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Our political system is a problem. The structure of our political discourse. Our political media a source of dysfunction and barrier to being able to address systemic problems which are evident to anyone with half a brain. And the left right spectrum only really afflicts political circles and press these days.

Fuck all point me attacking the right wing media, especially as their sole purpose seems to be trolling the left to keep them busy. Can you imagine the Telegraph or the Mail giving a shit what I think? ”A single mother doesn’t like what we say? Oh no…what will we do…that’s a bit of a surprise”.

The route to changing our political media is questioning the part of it whose stated ‘values’ require your agreement they are a force for good for you. It just so happens that our left wing media and politicos used twitter and the blogosphere to simulate contact with the outside world and validate their views about how ‘helpful’ what they sell is. They had to because really. what they are selling is not that helpful. Disenfranchisement cannot happen on the Tory say so. It needs our entire political and media class to agree.

Seems like the only sensible thing to do is to use the influence given to social media to influence the only people who give a fuck about it. There is a reason the ‘liberal’ class implode at times like this. Because they need to. Seems a good idea to ‘nudge’ that along if you can. Don’t get me wrong, the left wing media are as unconcerned about what is currently happening as the right, but they have to pretend. It becomes difficult to pretend you are representing the invisible if they refuse to remain invisible using the tool you use to hide your lack of concern.

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This Graun report confirms, again, that the EDL are running out of steam. In a political vacuum where many of their tropes are mainstream, they have been rejected. Like the BNP before them. They will always have to go to a great deal of effort to maintain the appearance of support, and rely on anti-fascists and the left to give them credibility as a threat.

Fighting fascism depends on being able to identify it, where it is coming from, why it is a threat. And we can look a lot more mainstream than the EDL for that. The question about why neo liberalism requires organisations like the EDL doesn’t get answered by shouting at the ‘thick racists’ for their poor grammar. The question of why the image of the working class as racist needs to be perpetuated doesn’t either. It’s the clever racists you need to watch, and the ones blind to race but interested in power so willing to exploit and ignore the inequality racism creates.

In related news, a heavy dose of social control was dished out, under the pretext of fighting racism, as a nasty racist internet troll was jailed to huge public fanfare. The catalyst for the riots was the shooting of another black man in Tottenham, Mark Duggan. The actions of these police men in the aftermath, unlikely to get the same heavy handed response.

Maybe it is time to talk about racism. Really talk about it, including why austerity ‘blindly’ exploits inequality rooted in race. And the effect.

Seems like racism is only something we talk about to deflect attention from governments. Although it could just be coincidence that rich white men are consistently able to exploit inequality caused by gender and race, for their economic aims, without giving it a second thought.

NB- The ‘another black man’ was in context of other incidents regarding police violence and shootings, not in context of the internet troll.

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If one was to completely ignore the nationalism and political debate around the issue of Scottish Independence. Look at the trend’s shown by the europe wide politics of austerity, financialisation and marketisation of the past year, and the relationship of those trends to the democratic crisis we are in. Look at that in the context of the relationships between national governments and international money. Place that in the context of national political discourse jumping the shark with a pasty in it’s hand, one might reach the conclusion that there were reasons the Tories would like to see the ‘end of the Union’. Why neo-liberalism may require the end of the Union. Of course, once that happened you might want to ask why now? And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

I know I have said it before, but I always understood the natural consequence of globalisation to be that power would federalise up and devolve down. I fully expected the move towards regional assemblies, etc I always assumed that meant democracy would change. I never bothered to ask whether the European parliament was actually a Europe wide democratic institution, which in light of the Euro crisis was very naive.

Unfortunately the financial crisis appears not to have triggered any democratic response, but to have pushed us down the path where national government is becoming irrelevant as ‘the state’ is yanked away from people’s lives. along with their ability to participate in democracy which affects them. The tone of global financial institutions to western governments changed before the week of the riots. I don’t know anyone who looks at Newsnight now, without going WTF? We are in a democratic crisis that appears to be desirable.

Democracy seems to be devolving down, and the power federalising up is not democratic. I think the Scottish independence issue needs to be unwrapped from the traditional debate which surround questions of Scottish independence, and examined. Quite seriously, in the context of other trends emerging. Including the systematic erosion of local democracy through agreed privatisation. And the latest offerings from Cruddas.

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The ‘cuts’ which disproportionately affected women were the welfare cuts, local authority cuts which were subject to political consensus. Gender inequality was to be exploited under the veneer of an expansion of social conservatism with Labour too(Blue Labour?). If you could lay out precisely how Labour would done this, and NOT had this effect, I would be happy to retract this description of your ongoing coverage of ‘cuts disproportionately affecting women’:

‘Obfuscatory crap which exploits real hardship to further the political ends of the party whose fortunes underpin your political editorial.”

Women are not paying the price for Osborne, they are paying the price because they are completely and utterly invisible to political debate. Including that sold in the Guardian.

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Turns out they actually thought we should stockpile flammable liquids, so we could outlast strike. Ala Thatcher playbook. Oh for fucks sake. Will someone do something about the eighties revival, I am too young for politics to be retro.

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Julian Assange. George Galloway. Owen Jones. Another one will pop up soon. A personality of the left, to be considered infallible due to their ability to adopt the word left. A misogynist left will shout you down if you question their actions. Don’t question their words, their actions or the effect of what they say. Ability to describe a common enemy as ‘the right’ means solidarity is required, regardless of the effect. Solidarity meaning no criticism for fear of reprisals.

This is not a healthy way to explore ideas, in a period of history where everything is changing and needs to reassessed. Seems to me the tendency to deify media names is a by product of a political system where entry to the media is the aim, and only media friendly faces can bring about change. Which is clearly nonsense when our political media is such a source of dysfunction. I gave up idealising people I never met, when I gave up buying Just Seventeen.